Law and Society Lecture looks at human rights and trafficking

The annual Law and Society Lecture with Sally Engle Merry, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, will examine human rights, trafficking and the rise of indicator culture Monday.

The faculty co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University Sally Engle MerrySchool of Law and president of the American Ethnological Society, Merry will discuss “The Seductions of Quantification: Human Rights, Trafficking, and the Rise of Indicator Culture”.

Sally Engle Merry

The lecture will take place Dec. 2, from 2:30 to 4pm, Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building, Keele campus. A reception from 4 to 5pm at S701 Ross Bulding will follow the lecture.

Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), which received the Hurst Prize; Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006) for which she received the J.I. Staley Prize; Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwells, 2009) and co-edited with Mark Goodale The Practice of Human Rights (Cambridge, 2007). She also received the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007.

Merry received an honorary degree from McGill School of Law in 2013. She is currently writing a book on indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Social Science; the Graduate

Program in Socio-Legal Studies; the Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, and Crime & Society.